Hold on to your butts, Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone are re-teaming for the new movie Checkmate, according to the Hollywood Reporter. It’s an adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s upcoming non-fiction book of the same name, which dives into a 2022 scandal that rocked the chess world.
Fielder and Stone last blew our minds with The Curse, a black comedy at Showtime. This time around Fielder is set to direct while Stone’s Fruit Tree banner will produce. The whole project will be led by A24, which blew away offers from much larger studios with a reported seven-figure guarantee. “I’ve never seen A24 do that before,” THR quotes one insider saying. And what could make A24 this excited?
In 2022, at the St. Louis stop on the Grand Chess Tour, 19-year-old Hans Niemann upset Magnus Carlsen, the 31-year-old world No. 1 and arguably the strongest player of all time. As a chess nerd who followed that game live, it felt like when the top tennis seed loses in the first round of a major — rare enough to raise eyebrows, but not totally shocking. Then something unprecedented happened: Carlsen withdrew from the tournament while his team leaked to the media that Niemann had cheated.
Rumors had dogged Niemann for years, and Chess.com later confirmed he did cheat in online play. But getting help online is as easy as opening a second browser window, while cheating over the board at a top tournament is much harder: Competitors pass through metal detectors, phones are banned, and monitors patrol the playing hall. Also, to many observers, it didn’t look like Carlsen had been slowly squeezed by a superior mechanical mind, which is how computer vs. grandmaster usually goes down. Instead, it kind of seemed like Carlsen blundered in the endgame, and then threw a fit when he lost.
Next came the questions: How exactly would Niemann have cheated? Memes had the answers, and a never-serious but pretty amusing theory about vibrating anal beads went viral. It’s been almost two years since then, and in the interim both Carlsen and Niemann have taken nearly every opportunity to make themselves look more foolish. If you only know Nathan Fielder, or if you only follow chess, you have no idea how perfect these two are for each other.
Stone’s collaboration with Fielder is just one of many artistic partnerships that are currently bearing fruit. After she won an Oscar with Yorgos Lanthimos for Poor Things, she’s starring in his next film, Kinds of Kindness, and she was recently credited with an assist on Taylor Swift’s “Florida!!!” Stone also recently joined the cast of another A24 film, Ari Aster’s Eddington.